Collect customer payments

Open Payments and its collection action, or Collect on a customer / Collect payment on an invoice. Payment-creation permission is required. The customer must be accessible in your branch scope.

Record a collection

1. In Collect a payment, pick the customer. Check Owes now, Waiting on cheques and Advance held.
2. Under Open invoices, type the amount to pay on each invoice. Copy all copies the actual due; after entering money received, Oldest first distributes it over the oldest payable invoices. Clear removes allocations.
3. Under Money received, choose the method and enter a positive Amount, Date and useful Reference. Add method splits one collection across several methods.
4. For a cheque, enter Cheque no, Cheque date, Bank where known and the appropriate Cheque status. Use the status supported by what actually happened.
5. Review Bills selected, Received, Pays today, Cheque still to clear and Kept as advance. Resolve Short by before saving.
6. Select Save collection. Check the resulting payment and receipt, or customer confirmation when only an existing advance was used.

Understand the result

Money not allocated to selected bills can remain as an advance. A pending cheque plans payment of invoices but does not count as cleared money. Amounts already covered by pending cheques are excluded from the actual due available for another allocation, preventing collection against the same covered amount.

If an existing customer advance is available as a method, using it spends money already held. An advance-only allocation does not create a new payment record. This collection form needs a positive invoice allocation; do not treat it as a general form for an advance with no invoice selected.

If saving fails, read the error and review invoice due amounts, existing cheque coverage, advance available and method details. Reopen the customer’s records before retrying after an uncertain result to avoid recording the same collection twice.

Find and print a receipt

Open Payments with payment-list permission. Search by receipt number or customer name/code, or filter Method, Status, From and To. The summary follows these filters: Collected counts posted payments; Not cleared counts pending payments.

Open a receipt number to check Amount, On account, Status, Who paid and Where it landed. Planned cheque allocations are not cleared invoice payments. Choose Print receipt when you need a copy; viewing a receipt requires payment-view permission and access to its branch.